1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to providing quality of service in a networked environment, and more particularly to a quality of service mechanism for synchronizing distributed state and session information in a client-server environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the client server environment, a session may include a series of user-application interactions that may be tracked by one or more servers. Sessions may be used for maintaining user-specific states, and may include persistent objects (e.g. handles to Enterprise Java Beans and/or database record sets) and authenticated user identities, among other interactions. For example, a session may be used to track a validated user login followed by a series of directed activities for that particular user. The session may reside in a server. For each request, a client may transmit a session ID in a cookie or, if the client does not allow cookies, the server may automatically write a session ID into a URL. The session ID may be used as a database key to access persistent objects associated with the client. Types of sessions may include, but are not limited to, distributed sessions and local sessions. Distributed sessions may be distributed among multiple servers, for example in a cluster, whereas local sessions may be bound to an individual server.
Distributed sessions may facilitate scalability, fail-safe techniques, and security. For example, a web server may distribute activity to remain scalable with respect to network traffic. Thus, a complete description (referred to as “session data”) of a distributed session may include state information for each process and/or computing system over which the session is distributed. For example, session data may include a snapshot of a session between a web browser and a web server may include one or more of the state of the web browser process(es), the state of the computing system hosting the web browser, the state of the web server process(es), the state of the computing system hosting the web server, the state of the computing system hosting an application server providing content to the web server, the sate of the application server process(es), and the state of one or more applications, processes and/or threads hosted by the application server or optionally on any other system involved in the distributed session.
For a distributed session, a primary state and one or more client states may be maintained. The primary state may be defined as a global instance of session data accessible by one or more application servers. A client state may be defined as a local instance of session data on an application server. The client state may include session data from internal or external client interaction with the application server. For example, the client may include, but is not limited to, a process, a thread within a process, or an application running on one or more external or internal devices and/or computing systems. The client states may serve as interfaces between clients, application servers, and the primary state, and may provide read and/or write access to the primary state to the application servers.
Client-server applications may store distributed session information as snapshots of the states of participating processes, resources, and computing systems to minimize data loss in case of failure. Current techniques for storing state information from distributed sessions may result in inconsistent primary state data and consume significant amounts of resources.
Client state information may be retrieved and written by multiple servers at the same time resulting in data loss. For example, an application on one server may access session data in a primary state, while another application on another server accesses the same session data. Then, the first application may update the session data. The second application may update the session data after the first application. Portions of the session data updated by the first application may be overwritten, resulting in loss of data. This data loss may be referred to as “data clobbering.”
State information involving multiple applications and servers across a network may consume significant network resources. To update and/or backup state information, a large amount of data may be sent to one or more network storage mediums thereby consuming network bandwidth and other resources. Restoring state information from one or more network storage mediums may consume bandwidth and other resources as well. Bandwidth and resource intensive state save operations may result in delays in servicing requests. Such delays may adversely affect the quality of service of the application.